JANUARY–APRIL 2019 Report to Stakeholders Beyond Words At ProPublica, many of the stories we report are told through powerful, award-winning writing. But as an online news organization, we also use other storytelling media, including data visualization, interactive design, photography, illustration, audio and video. These techniques are increasingly important in our efforts to identify and expose abuses of power. Audio we obtained of sobbing children separated from their parents at the border prompted President Donald Trump to abandon the policy. A few weeks after we revealed footage of two police officers beating a handcuffed man in Elkhart, Indiana, the city’s police chief resigned. (In March, the officers were also indicted on civil rights charges.) ProPublica has recently expanded its capability in visual investigations with two newly hired journalists dedicated to obtaining visual and audio evidence from an array of sources — from insiders to social media to government agencies. Cover: Reporters Hannah Dreier, left, whose reporting on MS-13 won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and Ginger Thompson, right, lead on our family separation coverage, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer gold medal for public service and won the first-ever Peabody “Catalyst” Award. (Demetrius Freeman for ProPublica) PROPUBLICA REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS, JANUARY–APRIL 2019 1 ProPublica used geodata to create a graphic simulating the collision of the USS Fitzgerald and a container ship, one of the Navy’s worst accidents at sea. (Xaquín G.V. for ProPublica) Visualizing a Naval Disaster In February, we published “Fight the Ship,” a geodata on the ships’ locations, mapped the path of multimedia story that reconstructed a 2017 crash each vessel and created a graphic that simulated the involving the USS Fitzgerald, one of the deadliest crash, down to the moment the Fitzgerald was sent accidents in the history of Navy. The story, by reporters spinning out of control, rotating 360 degrees. T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi, The team also collected radar images and showed that the accident was entirely preventable, obtained video taken inside the ship, elements of and that the Navy’s senior leadership had endangered visual evidence that allowed them to portray the the warship by sending an overworked, shorthanded disaster from the perspective of the sailors onboard. and undertrained crew to sea with outdated and Citing ProPublica’s reporting — and specifically our poorly maintained equipment. simulation — the House Armed Services Committee To help readers understand what happened — the convened a panel weeks after the story’s publication scale of the crash and why, given all the technology to question senior Navy leaders on the status of at their disposal, the Fitzgerald’s crew members reforms that were promised in the wake of the couldn’t tell they were headed for a collision with an deadly collision. enormous container ship — ProPublica hired designer Xaquín G.V. to help show it. Working with visual investigations producer Lucas Waldron, Xaquín used PROPUBLICA REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS, JANUARY–APRIL 2019 2 Our map showing counties where income tax filings were audited at a higher rate than the nation as a whole revealed the IRS’ disproportionate emphasis on auditing the working poor. (Hannah Fresques/ProPublica) Telling Maps Also in February, ProPublica news applications To do so, Kiel and Fresques created two interactive developer Al Shaw created a visualization of the maps: one showing where the IRS audits more, the spread of the natural gas industry across West other showing where the IRS audits less. The first Virginia. Shaw assembled every single aerial image map, of the most intense auditing activity, mirrored taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build patterns of poverty in America, with rural counties a map showing the location of more than 5,000 in the Deep South, Appalachia and Native American permitted natural gas wells. The interactive graphic reservations in the West bearing the greatest brunt. — created in partnership with the Charleston Gazette- The most heavily audited county in the country, Mail, a participant in the ProPublica Local Reporting it turned out, was a largely African American Network — allowed residents to search for well community in Mississippi. The second map, of less permits near their homes. For the first time, people scrutinized locales, highlighted places with middle- across the state had the data to know how close they income, largely white populations such as New were living to potentially harmful fracking operations. Hampshire, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The visuals In April, ProPublica continued its investigation of were so striking that Congress held two hearings. the IRS’ disproportionate emphasis on auditing the Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., used a blown up copy of the tax returns of the working poor. Reporter Paul Kiel ProPublica maps as he grilled the IRS commissioner and data reporter Hannah Fresques discovered that on how the agency plans to avoid “implicit or explicit” the agency audits Americans living in poorer counties bias in its future audits. far more frequently than in the richest — and they wanted to make this disparity starkly apparent. PROPUBLICA REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS, JANUARY–APRIL 2019 3 Our investigation with the Los Angeles Times found that every nine days, on average, a Border Patrol car chase ends in a crash. An animated map re-created the events of one such chase. (Agnes Chang/ProPublica) Looking Hard at Border Crashes A collaboration with the Los Angeles Times in April Video journalist Nadia Sussman and visual showed how Border Patrol agents engage in high- investigations producer Waldron went to the U.S.- speed vehicle chases of people suspected of entering Mexico border, camera in tow, and filmed the path the country illegally, leading to gruesome injuries followed by several of the chases. Their footage and deaths. Many police departments have sharply showed the long distances such confrontations restricted high-speed pursuits, but the Border Patrol can cover and was part of a map that re-created the has continued the practice. The story by ProPublica events of a chase that ended in a crash. After a FOIA fellow Kavitha Surana and Times reporters Brittny request, Waldron also gained access to a startling Mejia and James Queally examined 500 Border Patrol video showing an SUV being chased by Border chases, with one in three ending in a crash. One Patrol and, ultimately, crashing through a highway accident sparked a fire that spread over more than guardrail down a ravine, killing its 18-year-old 20 acres. Another injured a dozen bystanders and six driver and two passengers. The layout, by editorial immigrants, including a 6-year-old girl who wound experience designer Agnes Chang, integrated the text up on life support. of the story with the video graphic, giving readers an immersive experience. PROPUBLICA REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS, JANUARY–APRIL 2019 4 Seeing Through the Eyes of Partners Our continued collaborations with other news organizations also led to revelatory video journalism. Our series on video gambling in Illinois, by ProPublica Illinois’ Jason Grotto and Sandhya Kambhampati and WBEZ’s Dan Mihalopoulos, examined how the state installed more than 30,000 video slot and poker machines at locations such as truck stops, restaurants and hair salons since 2012. Gamblers in Illinois lost more than $5 billion at the machines, yet the state has done little to address the issue of addiction. A video explainer by former Vox-ProPublica video fellow Ranjani Chakraborty helped readers understand why video gambling, described as “electronic morphine,” is so seductive to the human brain. The video showed how the software running the machines is designed to accelerate the pace of play, extend the time people spend on them and increase the amount of money they wager. In partnership with PBS Frontline, ProPublica reporter Joaquin Sapien investigated a New York Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Nestor Bunch struggled with policy to move people out of institutions and into hunger and violence when he was transferred from a group private apartments. He found that social workers felt home to his own unsupervised apartment. (George Etheredge, pressured to move people into apartments even when special to ProPublica) they were not good candidates for living on their own. Lacking the structure of the institutions, some Steinhardt of sexual harassment; and a piece on the of these people suffered dehumanizing, sometimes Transportation Security Administration’s full-body fatal harm. Bringing the reality of the program’s scanners that frequently give false security alarms failures into discomforting focus, a documentary for hairstyles popular among black women. We done in partnership with the PBS program Frontline also kicked off a second year of our Local Reporting — “Right to Fail” — captured the neglect and squalid Network, with our first reports by The Public’s Radio conditions experienced by many of New York City’s — an investigation into Rhode Island’s 911 emergency most vulnerable citizens. system, illuminating the poor training of its operators resulting in unnecessary deaths — as well Other important stories from the first months of a Sacramento Bee examination of how California’s 2019 included a scoop on Purdue Pharma, showing efforts to reform the state prison system left its county how Richard Sackler embraced the plan to conceal jails more deadly and a Charleston Post and Courier OxyContin’s potency from doctors; a powerful essay report on how complaints against South Carolina’s on the resurgence of violent crime in Baltimore circuit judges are handled in secret under a system following Freddie Gray’s death in 2015; a collaboration that shields the accused. with the New York Times profiling seven women who came forward accusing philanthropist Michael Many more investigations are underway. Stay tuned. PROPUBLICA REPORT TO STAKEHOLDERS, JANUARY–APRIL 2019 5 Impact The most important test of ProPublica is whether our work is having impact.